


Cable

by abluevixen (knightofbows)



Series: | January 2016 Prompt Challenge | [7]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Hurt!Derek, Hurt!Stiles, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-23 01:13:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6100005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knightofbows/pseuds/abluevixen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles doesn't think he'll survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cable

Stiles groaned when he came to, consciousness a fleeting, fragile thing he desperately reaches for. The world was a muddy, foggy mess of conflicting sensations and a general overload—too much sound, too much light. Just…too much.

“Stiles? Stiles…”

His huffed breath degraded into a cough, and Stiles blinked bleary eyes. He couldn’t tell the difference between genuine darkness and the visual impairments of a possible head wound, but he heard Derek’s voice; rough, ragged, urgent, but _there_ as he repeated Stiles’ name, trying to get his attention. He was close, too, and that was comforting.

“’m awake,” Stiles muttered. “’m here.”

“Good,” Derek sighed. “That’s good.” Derek’s voice came from just above Stiles head, it seemed. They were laying down, maybe? Stiles couldn’t tell, disoriented as he was.

“The building collapsed,” Stiles said. He coughed again, and recalled the floor falling out from beneath him, the ceiling following shortly after. He’d been within seconds of freeing Derek, but the pair of them went with the tumbling walls into darkness before he’d finished the job. “The coven leader found us. Brought the house down, I guess?”

Derek hummed. “Possibly.”

“You don’t remember?”

“We landed pretty hard.”

Stiles made a sound of agreement, then asked, “Are you hurt?”

“…’m fine,” Derek sighed. “You aren’t, though.”

“Huh.” Stiles lifted his aching arm—aching, but functional and probably not battered too badly—and wiped his face. The sleeve came away damp, but the darkness didn’t dissipate. It was just generally dark, he hoped. “I don’t feel anything. I mean, my arm’s a little sore, and I’m generally achy, but, yeah.”

“I can smell your blood, and the adrenaline. Shock.”

“Thanks, Dr. Hale. What about you?”

Whatever answer Derek gave was drowned out by a slow, vibrating rumble. It crescendoed into a deafening screeched, and whatever they were lying on—because it certainly wasn’t the ground—shifted precariously beneath them. Then it dropped, suddenly, violently. Stiles couldn’t tell how far, but when he landed again, he felt something crack in his chest, and he whimpered. Once the ringing in his ears subsided, he heard Derek growling, a soft, weak sound with every exhale.

“Derek! Derek?”

“I’m okay, Stiles,” Derek said, croaky. He spat, then said, “Just not as much, now.”

“I think my ribs cracked.”

“Just two.”  
  
“Dude, did you _hear_ them? Oh, that’s so fucked up.” Stiles tried to laugh, but it hurt. A lot. So he quickly stopped, then said, “We need to figure out how to get out of here. Can you, like, howl for Scott or something?” He tested his achy but still uninjured arm—small miracles—to pull a small flashlight from his pocket. The shattered pieces of his cell phone’s touch screen were pinching pains in one thigh, but his flashlight was a metal bar bruising his other. The flashlight had been through hell and back. This cell phone was the fourth he’d broken in a year. He clicked it on, and aimlessly angled its beam around to test its reliability. “Sweet,” he breathed. “Best four dollars I’ve ever spent.”

“Don’t look at your leg,” Derek warned.

So, of course, Stiles did.

“Holy—” And he tried not to throw up. The only upside was how numb he still was. He couldn’t feel just how mangled or crushed or twisted his leg was, despite how it was pinned between pieces of rubble from the knee down. But his brain tried to supply something vaguely similar, so Stiles started a litany of swears instead of crying.

Derek said, “Stiles, you’re okay. You’re going to be okay. Stiles, look at me. I’m right above you. Look at me.”

Taking a heaving, gulping breath, Stiles moved the flashlight and let his leg disappear in the dark. He shifted as much as he could—aside from his leg, he was generally unencumbered—and aimed the light in the general vicinity of Derek’s voice.

He found the wolf’s knees first, and both of his legs and feet seemed fine. No blood or open wounds that Stiles could see. Then he traced Derek’s body upward, and Derek’s abs, those perfectly, beautifully sculpted muscles Stiles wanted to run his tongue over were marred by a piece of rusted, bloody rebar protruding from the right side. Through the kidney, if Stiles recalled humanoid anatomy correctly. Beside it, the electrodes that kept Derek sedated in the witches’ hold were still attached, though no longer connected to a power source. Stiles swallowed thickly, then continued his unintentional and inadvertent visual assessment. Moving further up Derek’s body, his bare torso was covered in sweat and grime, dust and blood. Just beneath Derek’s left pectoral, just shy of his fucking heart, holy shit, was another piece of rebar, just as bloody and rusted as the other. When Stiles finally glanced the flashlight beam over Derek’s face, the wolf was pale, starkly so beneath the dark hair of his scruff, and his eyes a little glassy. Derek smiled for Stiles despite it all, and Stiles couldn’t help smiling back.

“Dude, you are not okay,” Stiles said. He used the beam of light to assess their surroundings: the pair of them pinned on a slab of concrete that might have once been the floor of Derek’s prison; the slab seemed to hang in space, somehow suspended by unknown and probably questionable means—it creaked and groaned periodically, and Stiles felt a little motion sick; their pocket of air and not-completely-crushed probably wouldn’t last very long; and it seemed sheer _chance_ Stiles hadn’t been impaled by one of the several random jutting pieces of rebar, but Derek had.

“Better off than you are,” Derek sniped back, tired. “I’ll heal in a few days. Your recovery will take _weeks_.”

Something creaked like twisting metal, and Stiles jerked the flashlight in the sound’s general direction. It landed on a trembling, slowly unraveling metal cable. It hung directly above Stiles, almost perfectly bisecting his torso, and supported a sinking mound of rubble. When it snapped…

“Derek,” Stiles said, another groan echoing as another few fibers of the cable snapped. “Derek, we really need to get out of here. Fast. That…that cable’s gonna…”

“I know,” Derek said. His eyes flared brilliant blue. “I see it.”

“Can you howl for Scott or something?”

“It’ll just make things more unstable, like an avalanche in the Alps.”

“Then what do we do?”

Derek took a breath, and his boots scraped loudly against the concrete. His claws gouged deep, and Stiles turned the beam back to the wolf just in time to see the tracks he left in his wake. Derek grabbed the end of the one of the rebar pieces and _yanked_. The bar bent and pulled, and the wolf sucked in a hissing breath, then panted for a few moments before doing it again, but in the opposite direction.

“Derek, what are you doing?”

The cable whined, and fibers hummed like guitar stings as they popped. Stiles kept the flashlight on Derek, however, watching him bend the rebar back and forth, weakening it.

With a final grunt, Derek pulled the bar and it finally _finally_ snapped. It broke mere inches above Derek’s inflamed, bleeding flesh. He quickly went to work on the other bar that pinned him, bending it back and forth, back and forth. Each push or pull left him visibly tired, his face paling another shade with every huff of effort. It reminded Stiles of when Derek had been poisoned by Kate’s wolfsbane bullet, way back when they still tried to intimidate and impress each other. But his eyes were glowing, his fangs descended, and his claws out. He was almost half-shifted as he fought what restrained him.

When the rubble shifted and the cable strained, their suspended platform rocked and dropped another few feet. Stiles cried out when a little more of his leg became pinned, and Derek bit back a growl. Stiles turned to watch the unraveling cable, the cable that would surely cut him in half when it snapped, but listened keenly to Derek working the rebar to breaking.

“We’re gonna die here,” Stiles murmured. The flashlight beam glinted off the cable’s broken metal fibers, razor sharp like Derek’s claws.

“We’re not,” Derek grunted.

“Yeah, we are,” Stiles said. “You might make it out, with your healing and stamina and werewolfy-ness. But not me.”

“Stiles…” And it sounded like a warning.

Stiles didn’t listen. “Look after my dad for me, okay? Scott’s too wrapped up in Kira and being and alpha and you—”

“—don’t have anything,” Derek finished for him. He drawled, “Thanks for—”

“That’s not what I meant,” Stiles sighed. He aimed the flashlight just shy of Derek’s eyes, so he could see the werewolf’s face without blinding him. “I just meant that Scott is oblivious and forgetful. If I ask you, I know you’ll do it. That’s all.”

“Yeah,” Derek agreed. “Yeah, I will.”

“Cool.”

Derek added quickly, “But you’re not dying here.” And the second piece of rebar snapped. Derek tossed it aside where it clanked downwards into oblivion.

“Don’t think there’s much we can do about that,” Stiles laughed.

As Derek fought to lift himself off his impalements, Stiles turned the light back towards the fraying cable. He watched a few more pieces break, and took a shuddering breath when the rubble it supported fell a few dangerous inches. The fibers broke faster now, the gravity and mass and every law of physics coming together to enact on the cable that was coming apart.

Derek landed hard beside Stiles, and it wasn’t until then that Stiles realized they weren’t, technically flat. Their slab of concrete was on an angle, one Derek fought hard to compensate in his weakened state, as he assessed Stiles’ situation.

“You can’t move the rubble,” Stiles said. “Not without everything possibly collapsing further. Hell, it might make that cable snap way sooner than it otherwise would.”

“It’s snapping in a few seconds regardless,” Derek said. His voice was soft, but devoid of inflection, and the _ping-ping_ of fine metal breaking was loud over it. Loud and fast, like a Mumford  & Sons banjo solo. He smashed his hand into the concrete beside Stiles’ head, digging his claws deep, then repeated the action with his other hand. With his lupine grace, he eased his body flush against Stiles’ and held himself there.

“The cable’s gonna cut you in half!” Stiles hissed.

They were damn near nose to nose. Derek’s stubble was much softer than it looked, the ghost of its touch just enough to send Stiles to shivers while Derek pressed his nose against his temple. He blamed it on the shock.

“I’ll heal,” Derek said. “Hide your face, Stiles, and tuck in your arms.”

And Stiles didn’t question the order as he pressed the bridge of his nose against Derek’s Adam’s apple, as he brought his arms close so he could hook his fingertips in Derek’s belt. “Derek…”

“You’ll be okay,” Derek promised. Then he kissed the top of Stiles’ head, but Stiles might have imagined it. “Everything will be alright.”

The cable snapped.

**Author's Note:**

> You can also find me on tumblr: [foxtricks](http://foxtricks.tumblr.com/)


End file.
